Hollow Man
Paul Verhoeven’s Hollywood career is a fascinating one. In 13 years, he brought his sensibilities about sex, violence and dark comedy to science fiction (“Robocop,” “Total Recall,” “Starship Troopers”) and boundary-pushing erotic cinema (“Basic Instinct,” “Showgirls”). His final film in Hollywood, 2000’s “Hollow Man,” delves more into horror, and while those elements are interesting, where this film fails is in the execution, with a screenplay by Andrew Marlowe (“Air Force One”) that doesn’t really fall in line with Verhoeven’s style.
“Hollow Man” is Verhoeven’s riff on “The Invisible Man,” with Kevin Bacon playing Sebastian Caine, a scientist working on a military project for invisibility with a team that includes Linda McKay (Elisabeth Shue), Matthew Kensington (Josh Brolin) and Sarah Kennedy (Kim Dickens). They have an underground lab where they are studying the scientific process of turning something/someone invisible, and while they have made progress with animals, figuring out a way to reverse the process has been the struggle. One night, Sebastian has a breakthrough, and it works. Time for human trials, which Sebastian will gladly be a test subject for. When they try and bring him back, though, the process stalls, and he is stuck like this for the foreseeable future.
Sebastian Caine is one of the sleaziest lead characters Paul Verhoeven has ever given us. He’s an arrogant genius, who sees himself as a God, so the power trip the character goes on when he’s given the ability to work in the shadows is completely natural- that, in and of itself, would have been enough for this to be a successful riff of “The Invisible Man” trope. Unfortunately, Verhoeven’s base instincts come through in the character’s perverted nature, which is set up early on when he’s peeping on a neighbor across the way. When he is invisible, he naturally uses that to really satisfy those urges, both with colleagues, and with the neighbor in a scene of sexual assault that is unsettling and completely unnecessary. Caine’s misogyny has no real value to the film, and while the character gives Bacon a lot of meat to chew on (he clearly enjoys the latitude Verhoeven and Marlowe are giving him), there were other ways this film could have shown abuses of this power without getting this disturbingly creepy.
Outside of Bacon, the film’s MVPs are composer Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote some of the best suspense/mystery music this side of Bernard Herrmann (not just here but in “Basic Instinct”), and the film’s visual effects team. The recent “Invisible Man” does a great job of updating the premise, but this was a good stepping stone to bringing modern science to this premise. The way the effects show us the process of both becoming invisible, and then reversing the process, is great horror movie visual trickery, and Verhoeven still has his gifts for being able to wring suspense out of terror. The film gives him a good playground to exercise those chops, but his penchant towards the perverted brings the film down, and he lets the finale go completely overboard into lunacy. Twenty years later, it makes sense that “Hollow Man” sent Verhoeven out of Hollywood. His way of storytelling had played out in the studio system.
